Local Food Systems Course for Extension Educators in North Carolina: Summary of an Innovative Program

Interest in local foods began in the early 2000s and has grown substantially over the past decade and a half. Although Extension is addressing local food systems in many states, training and materials in this program area are nascent. To address this circumstance, we developed a graduate course on local food systems for Extension educators. Post-course evaluations indicate increased confidence and knowledge related to local food system facilitation, implementation, and evaluation. Students cited site tours and panel presentations as the most effective course aspects and suggested improving the course by adjusting content to account for varying levels of familiarity with local food systems

Applying emerging core competencies to extension training courses for local food system practitioners

In 2019, a national group of local food system educators and practitioners identified over 140 foundational core competencies critical to local food system development work and began to identify existing educational resources related to these competencies. This process resulted in a new aggregated resource: the Local Food System Practitioner and Educational Resource Database. Included in this database is a core competency matrix that distinguishes three levels of learning for each competency so that practitioners can identify learning opportunities most closely tailored to their educational needs. It also serves as a framework and competency matrix for educators to use to help assess and communicate the learn­ing out­comes of their curricula. This framework is the overall concept for understanding the compe­ten­cies, and the matrix is the tool developed to assess and evaluate the level at which an educa­tional resource teaches a competency. In this article we apply the newly create core competency matrix to two existing local food system develop­ment courses. We share lessons learned from applying the matrix and insights gained from com­paring two introductory level courses. We con­clude with recommendations for improving the resource database and matrix to a more user-friendly model for educators and local food system practitioners